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Apple is the new China

The recent war between Apple and Adobe and the jus­ti­fi­ca­tions made in Apple’s defense (ignore the preda­tory behav­ior in the tech space because it is too big a mar­ket to ignore) bring to mind the atti­tude that most large Amer­i­can cor­po­ra­tions have regard­ing China (ignore the civil rights abuses because it is too big a mar­ket to ignore).

The closed environment

For years now, I have wor­ried about Apple’s ten­dency to pre­fer closed envi­ron­ments to open ones when it came first to its iPod line of prod­ucts, then its iPhone line, and now it’s iPad one. Each of the prod­uct are ter­rific con­sump­tion tools but that’s where they stop and my worry stems from the trend they cre­ate, one where Apple is cre­at­ing an increas­ingly closed envi­ron­ment, more in line with the type of think­ing that per­me­ates the con­sumer elec­tron­ics, movie, and tele­phone indus­try than the one that exists in the com­puter world. It seems that when­ever Apple enters a new indus­try, it may have a small impact on that indus­try but the indus­try itself has a big impact on Apple.

Of course, one could see this as a nat­ural evo­lu­tion as the counter-culture 1970s Steve Jobs was booted out of Apple and, after a long exile, came back as Steve Jobs, founder of Pixar and even­tu­ally mor­phed into Steve Jobs, largest Dis­ney share­holder. The net result is that the Apple leader has now learned to turn his com­pany into the new Dis­ney, bring­ing safe prod­ucts to the masses in a highly ster­il­ized envi­ron­ment that may not appeal to all.

And a Dis­ney­world ver­sion of com­put­ing is OK for most peo­ple. Most peo­ple love the magic king­dom but, for a por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion, Dis­ney­world is a place you visit, not one you live in. And that’s where con­flict arises.

For peo­ple who have lived in the mostly free-for-all envi­ron­ment of the com­put­ing indus­try (and its cousin, the anything-goes world of the Inter­net), the idea of a Dis­ney­i­fied world is as close as you will get to their con­cept of hell. And those peo­ple tend to be the ones that develop applications.

Two Impulses

So devel­op­ers now find them­selves con­flicted between two impulses:

The mar­ket size issue is one that larger tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies are start­ing to grap­ple with in another arena: China. For exam­ple, Google has been try­ing to fig­ure out the right bal­ance between insist­ing that China stop cen­sor­ing inter­net con­tent and pro­tect­ing its chances at get­ting into that mar­ket. Many of Google’s com­peti­tors, in the mean­time, stood on the side­line, argu­ing that China is too large a mar­ket to ignore and that cor­po­ra­tions should not get involved into pol­i­tics, a posi­tion that is often at odds with their own actions in the US.

But back to Apple.

Apple vs. Adobe

For those who have not been fol­low­ing what’s hap­pen­ing between Apple and Adobe, here’s what’s hap­pen­ing. Adobe owns Flash, a prod­uct that allows for video or more inter­ac­tive type of con­tent  on the web. Thanks to the Flash tech­nol­ogy, dis­trib­ut­ing video on the inter­net became a real­ity because the Flash player ran on most browsers and, thanks to strong mar­ket­ing by Macro­me­dia (the com­pany that was man­ag­ing Flash at the time and was acquired by Adobe), the Flash player became ubiq­ui­tous on computers.

When Apple first released the iPhone, it pre­sented it as a dif­fer­ent type of phone because it offered a browser that gave its users access to “the full Inter­net,” a state­ment that high­lighted how poorly other mobile phones ren­dered web pages. This was a major advance  but there were a cou­ple of things that were not included: in order to ensure that the browser ran quickly and reli­ably on the lower-CPU phones, Apple made a tech­ni­cal deci­sion to remove Java and plu­gin sup­port from its browser. For the most part, that was OK but many peo­ple started com­plain­ing that Flash was not included because a large amount of inter­net video was deliv­ered using the flash player. Apple said, at the time, that its part­ner­ship with YouTube should offer with enough video con­tent and that the other groups were pretty much fringe.

Over the years, the dis­cus­sion con­tin­ued in tech cir­cles and Adobe, now own­ers of Flash, decided to repo­si­tion it as a tool that would allow for cre­at­ing inter­ac­tive con­tent that could run on any plat­form. It was widely known in devel­op­ment cir­cles that Adobe was work­ing on a ver­sion of Flash that would help devel­op­ers cre­ate iPhone appli­ca­tions with the Flash devel­op­ment tools. So Apple upped the stakes by ban­ning its devel­op­ment com­mu­nity from lever­ag­ing such tools. Because of the tight con­trol Apple has over what gets on the iPhone and iPad, it essen­tially killed any chances of using Flash to cre­ate pro­grams for those platforms.

As one would expect, Adobe was very unhappy. They had made the abil­ity to cre­ate iPhone appli­ca­tions with Flash a key fea­ture of their new offer­ing. So they huffed and puffed enough to get the tech com­mu­nity fired up.

The con­tro­versy has now got­ten so strong that it got a response from Steve Jobs him­self, which resulted in Adobe aban­don­ing their strat­egy of dis­tri­b­u­tion on Apple devices.

Apple: Stan­dard bearer for openness?

Jobs’ note is inter­est­ing in many aspects. On the one hand, he does seem to address many of the issues that have been raised and explain why Apple’s posi­tion is the friendly one. On the other, peo­ple with enough knowl­edge of the under­ly­ing tech­nolo­gies can see some cracks in the argu­ments made:

First, there’s “Open”

That Apple would lead with the con­cept of open­ness is ironic at its best and deceiv­ing at its worst. While it’s true that Adobe Flash is not open, Apple’s selec­tive list of stan­dards it is sup­port­ing reveals some of the pol­i­tics sur­round­ing web stan­dards. Yes, HTML5 is com­pletely open but the issue of video in HTML5 is a small devel­oper skir­mish in which Apple is back­ing a horse that is not nec­es­sar­ily the most open one.

H.264

It’s inter­est­ing that, in the para­graph about open­ness, Steve Jobs men­tions HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript but leaves the issue of video codec for later in his note. That comes in the dis­cus­sion of “the full web” where he men­tions sup­port for H.264.

That name rep­re­sents a stan­dard that is not an open one. In fact, it’s one that needs to be licensed in order to be used and, while many peo­ple use it (as Apple’s note demon­strate), it’s one that could gen­er­ate roy­al­ties for many com­pa­nies when the agree­ment to make this stan­dard royalties-free for inter­net video ends in 2015. And one of the com­pa­nies that would get some of those roy­al­ties is.…

(if you haven’t guessed, you must have skimmed throught the rest of the article)

sur­prise, it’s Apple Inc., a com­pany that hap­pens to own some pro­pri­etary intel­lec­tual prop­erty that is included in this standard.

And, sur­pris­ingly, the best tool for author­ing con­tent for the H.264 stan­dard is Quick­time, a piece of soft­ware that is dis­trib­uted by… Apple.

I’m not going to deny that the rest of the argu­ments (around secu­rity, per­for­mance, and bat­tery life) may hold value. I’m also not going to claim that Jobs is wrong in say­ing that the “Touch” expe­ri­ence is not fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent from the expe­ri­ence that Flash was ini­tially cre­ated for.

But I am going to go out on a limb and say that this whole fight between Apple and Adobe comes down to a sin­gle thread: Who will con­trol video on the web. Jobs is prob­a­bly not thrilled that Flash has usurped Quick­time as the main con­tender on the web and is work­ing on chang­ing that.

Reassert­ing closed systems

While the war between Adobe and Apple is an amus­ing soap opera, the last rea­son Jobs gives for not sup­port­ing Flash ought to be the most chill­ing to the devel­op­ment com­mu­nity. I could para­phrase but I wouldn’t do it jus­tice so here’s what he said (empha­sis is mine):

We know from painful expe­ri­ence that let­ting a third party layer of soft­ware come between the plat­form and the devel­oper ulti­mately results in sub-standard apps and hin­ders the enhance­ment and progress of the plat­form. If devel­op­ers grow depen­dent on third party devel­op­ment libraries and tools, they can only take advan­tage of plat­form enhance­ments if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new fea­tures. We can­not be at the mercy of a third party decid­ing if and when they will make our enhance­ments avail­able to our devel­op­ers.

…

Our moti­va­tion is sim­ple – we want to pro­vide the most advanced and inno­v­a­tive plat­form to our devel­op­ers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoul­ders of this plat­form and cre­ate the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to con­tin­u­ally enhance the plat­form so devel­op­ers can cre­ate even more amaz­ing, pow­er­ful, fun and use­ful applications.

At first read, an innocu­ous set of state­ments but one that has poten­tial impli­ca­tions for the future of com­put­ing. If the think­ing in Cuper­tino is that third party devel­op­ment tools are bad, then what about the Mac and non-Apple devel­op­ment tools on OSX? Where would those stand. And, while the intro­duc­tion of new fea­tures are great, what hap­pens if Apple decides to remove old ones? That is ques­tion left unan­swered by this note and one that may leave the door open for more concerns.

Originally published on April 29, 2010 in Business, Media, Politics, Technology . You may find related thoughts pieces under the following terms: , , , , , ,

  • Don

    Apple has every right to define its prod­ucts. Then it becomes the consumer’s respon­si­bil­ity to decide whether or not to pur­chase them.

    For exam­ple, if I make and sell cakes, I have every right to deter­mine both the ingre­di­ents and the qual­ity of those ingre­di­ents that are used to pre­pare the cake. The var­i­ous suppliers/developers of pos­si­ble ingre­di­ents have no say in the mat­ter. It’s a cake of my design­ing, and I deter­mine what is allowed accord­ing to my stan­dards of qual­ity con­trol, etc.

    If con­sumers don’t like my cakes, they can buy other cakes. If sup­pli­ers want to par­tic­i­pate, they are only use­ful to me if they pro­vide the ingre­di­ents I require. By any mea­sure of per­for­mance, this is not a prob­lem. It is per­fectly reasonable.

    Per­son­ally, as a con­sumer I trust Apple to make good cakes because they have proven time and time again that one of their pri­mary objec­tives is an excel­lent end-user expe­ri­ence. Adobe, on the other hand, is not inter­ested in my expe­ri­ence at all. They and other development-tool providers are only inter­ested in sell­ing more on more copies of their tools to developers.

    In my opin­ion, Apple is doing the right thing. Bravo!

    • http://www.tnl.net/blog/ Tris­tan Louis

      Don,

      The chal­lenge is not for the con­sumer but for the devel­op­ers. I agree with you that Apple as the right to define its prod­uct. What I high­light in the post are 2 things:

      1. Some of the argu­ments that are made to sup­port the prod­uct def­i­n­i­tion are not based on real­ity.
      2. Devel­op­ers then have to choose whether to sup­port that vision or not.

      Do you think Apple has the right to lie because it builds nice prod­uct? If so, you fall on the side of the pro-China view (any­thing Apple does is fine because it’s a big mar­ket). That’s exactly my point..

  • http://rhftech.com/blog/ Richard

    Some­day, per­haps in two or three years, Apple will require websites/webpages to be approved by their cen­sors before they will allow them to dis­play on Apple devices. It is com­ing, only ques­tion is when it will arrive.

    • http://www.tnl.net/blog/ Tris­tan Louis

      I dis­agree about it being that close (the event hori­zon I’m look­ing at for such event is prob­a­bly more on the decades range) but it’s a very real pos­si­bil­ity. Apple fans will then claim that Apple is cor­rect in decid­ing what goes on their devices while oppo­nents will com­plain about the lack of open­ness (not that dif­fer­ent a dis­cus­sion than the one around today’s apps :) )

  • Don

    The the­sis of this arti­cle seems to be that Apple is too big a com­pany to be allowed to define its own prod­ucts. How ridiculous!

    • http://www.tnl.net/blog/ Tris­tan Louis

      Could you point to where I’m say­ing that Apple is not allowed to define its own prod­uct? What I point to is that while Apple can decide to do what­ever it wants with its plat­form, devel­op­ers may or may not agree with the direc­tion and are pre­sented with a tough chal­lenge: Sup­port the increas­ingly closed sys­tem and get access to Apple cus­tomer or take a stand against closed sys­tem and loose out on the finan­cial oppor­tu­ni­ties pre­sented by access to iPhone users. That’s the thesis.

      The sec­ond part of the post (which, I’m now think­ing, I should have sep­a­rated out into a dif­fer­ent post) is that Apple’s inter­est in the death of Flash has more to do with the poten­tial rev­enue Apple could get from an H.264 win than with any­thing else.

  • Don

    It does not mat­ter what the basis (moral or oth­er­wise) of Apple’s deci­sions might be. Apple can lie to itself or to any­one else for that mat­ter regard­ing why it insists on using cer­tain ingre­di­ents rather than oth­ers. It’s Apple’s prod­uct, and this is entirely up to them. If as a result, the devel­op­ers choose not to work with them, that is just fine. The devel­op­ers can work some­where else, and/or Apple can choose to mod­ify its cri­te­ria if the loss of developers/suppliers is so great that con­sumers don’t like the prod­uct (i.e., the cake becomes unac­cept­able to the con­sumer). That’s how busi­ness works! What’s the problem?

    • http://www.tnl.net/blog/ Tris­tan Louis

      Don,

      A quick ques­tion on that view (tak­ing Apple of the equa­tion for a sec­ond). If Microsoft took the same posi­tion when it comes to Win­dows or Office, would that be acceptable?

      Another ques­tion: if a gov­ern­ment (let’s say China) took deci­sions that are not in line with your own view­points (let’s say an Amer­i­can one) but had a large mar­ket­place, which deci­sion would you make: take a moral stance or do busi­ness with that gov­ern­ment? For Google, the deci­sion was to take a moral stance. For oth­ers (eg. Microsoft), it was to look the other way and get access to the mar­ket­place. My view is that Apple devel­op­ers are con­fronted with the same choice: take a moral stance (for tech­nol­ogy open­ness) and loose out on rev­enue or look the other way and profit from the Apple eco-system.

  • Al

    If Apple is China, wouldn’t that make Sony, Nin­tendo and Microsoft China as well? Their gam­ing con­soles are com­put­ers that are also closed envi­ron­ments. Apple’s mobile OS is closed and con­trolled for secu­rity pur­poses as well as qual­ity con­trol pur­poses. Same goes for Nin­tendo, PS3 and XBox 360.

    Adobe still doesn’t have a Flash player that works prop­erly on a mobile OS. Same goes for the Flash player for Mac OS X and OS X has been out for 10 years! I think Adobe has some blame in this discussion.

    As for port­ing Flash Apps to iPhone OS, they wouldn’t take advan­tage of the unique fea­tures avail­able in iPhone OS. They would be built around fea­tures found in all mobile OSs. They would be mediocre at best. The last thing the 200,000 app strong Apple App Store needs is more mediocre.

    • http://www.tnl.net/blog/ Tris­tan Louis

      Al,

      Three points here: 1. The gam­ing boxes / 2. Adobe and Flash / 3. Unique fea­tures of the iPhone

      Let me address them separately:

      1. The gam­ing boxes are indeed pre­sent­ing the same type of think­ing as Apple’s mobile space so no dis­agree­ment from me here. They’ve been that way for years so they could be seen as “old china” :) My argu­ment is only that Apple is the lat­est to close things up. I never argued that the oth­ers are not open.

      2. Agree that Adobe has a player that doesn’t work on ANY mobile OS. So this part of the argu­ment is valid. How­ever, the argu­ment that the flash player doesn’t work prop­erly on OSX is one that con­fuses me: As a long­time mac user (since before OSX), I’ve never had issues with the flash player. It seems to have worked OK on my ibooks, power­books, mac­books, and mac­book pros through a suc­ces­sion of OSX ver­sions (well, maybe things were not work­ing that well on OSX 10.0 but then again, not much was work­ing that well on OSX 10.0 :) ). That said, I agree with you that Adobe has some blame in this dis­cus­sion and nowhere in my post do I say that it is blame­less. Does that mean that Apple should get a free pass?

      3. A GPS, a com­pass, inter­net access, a cam­era, and mp3 read­ers are fea­tures avail­able in all mobiles OSs today. So I’m assum­ing, based on your think­ing, that appli­ca­tions that lever­ages or com­bines those are mediocre. If we were to look at the 200,000 apps in the App Store, what per­cent­age actu­ally lever­age fea­tures that are UNIQUE to the iPhone TODAY. My sus­pi­cion (based on expe­ri­ence with my own iPhone) is that the num­ber would actu­ally be fairly small.

  • Dav­eMTL

    You keep ignor­ing the anal­ogy to game con­soles which is a vastly big­ger mar­ket than tablets. Do you hon­estly believe Apple would have 80–90% of the tablet mar­ket or even the phone mar­ket?
    What makes “China’ China is the fact that you can­not find ANY alter­na­tive oper­at­ing in China which does NOT fol­low chi­nese rules. Don’t like that, then exit China. The Chi­nese will decide when they want dif­fer­ent.
    Sorry but it seems like you have grossly over­es­ti­mated Apple’s poten­tial mar­ket size. Like BMW and Mer­cedes, Apple will have a lim­ited por­tion of the over­all mar­ket. One which attracts those who wish a great user expe­ri­ence with both the prod­uct and the stores.

    • http://www.tnl.net/blog/ Tris­tan Louis

      Dav­eMTL,

      Apple actu­ally has an over­sized influ­ence com­pared to its mar­ket share. Where Apple goes, gen­er­ally, the rest of the tech­nol­ogy indus­try fol­lows. So while it’s true that its mar­ket share is small (though it is get­ting larger, some­thing that Apple prod­uct fans like myself are pretty thrilled about), its thought lead­er­ship impact is great. So, much like you say “can­not find ANY alter­na­tive oper­at­ing in China which does NOT fol­low chi­nese rules”, I would argue that in the com­puter indus­try, it is increas­ingly dif­fi­cult to find any alter­na­tive oper­at­ing in the indus­try which does not fol­low Apple’s mindset.

  • Don

    Tris­tan,

    Let me answer your quick ques­tion first (i.e., “If Microsoft took the same posi­tion when it comes to Win­dows or Office, would that be accept­able?”). If Microsoft said that only cer­tain tools could be used to develop for its Win­dows plat­form, yes, that would be accept­able as long as the tools are not solely sup­plied by Microsoft.

    Using the cake anal­ogy once again, let’s say Apple or Microsoft makes cakes and sells them to con­sumers. These com­pa­nies exer­cise their right to define exactly what their respec­tive cakes should be. Apple (or Microsoft) receives ingre­di­ents such as salt, sugar, and flour from a vari­ety of suppliers/developers. Now let’s say the com­pany, whichever it is, makes the deci­sion that only unbleached flour must be used in their cakes. There is noth­ing sin­is­ter, evil, or immoral about that. Those devel­op­ers who can only sup­ply bleached flour are out of luck with the com­pany. They have the option of sup­ply­ing other com­pa­nies that don’t care about what kind of flour is used. Oth­ers may decide to sup­ply both unbleached flour and bleached flour, and thereby con­tinue to ben­e­fit from doing busi­ness with that com­pany and other com­pa­nies as well.

    The fact of the mat­ter is that Apple/Microsoft has no legal or moral respon­si­bil­ity to explain to the supplier/developer WHY it is choos­ing cer­tain ingre­di­ents instead of oth­ers. The supplier/developer has no right to know why.

    Regard­ing your sec­ond ques­tion, if I were a devel­oper who was more in favor of a totally open tech­no­log­i­cal ecosys­tem (whether or not such a thing can exist in real­ity) than a par­tially closed ecosys­tem such as Apple’s, I would let the mar­ket decide over time which of these mod­els is actu­ally best from a con­sumer stand­point. Yes, I would say, “Let the con­sumers have access to both types and see which is pre­ferred.” As a result, my final deci­sion would be to develop for both if at all pos­si­ble. In other words, I would sim­ply sup­ply both types of flour if I could. If not, I would go with my pre­ferred type of ecosystem.

    (As a mat­ter of fact, per­son­ally, I have no pref­er­ence regard­ing closed vs open tech­no­log­i­cal ecosys­tems. How­ever, I tend to live in gated com­mu­ni­ties when pos­si­ble, and I con­tinue to find them much more enjoy­able and sat­is­fy­ing than non-gated neigh­bor­hoods and hous­ing com­mu­ni­ties. So I hap­pen to think Apple may have cho­sen wisely.)

    Those ques­tions aside, it’s impor­tant to remem­ber that Apple is not vio­lat­ing any human rights, and there is noth­ing immoral about their busi­ness model.

    • http://www.tnl.net/blog/ Tris­tan Louis

      Don,

      First of all, thanks for con­tin­u­ing the dia­logue on this. Much appreciated.

      I do need some points of clar­i­fi­ca­tions, though:

      Let me answer your quick ques­tion first (i.e., “If Microsoft took the same posi­tion when it comes to Win­dows or Office, would that be accept­able?”). If Microsoft said that only cer­tain tools could be used to develop for its Win­dows plat­form, yes, that would be accept­able as long as the tools are not solely sup­plied by Microsoft.

      So does that mean that Apple’s posi­tion would be accept­able as long as the tools to author appli­ca­tion for Apple devices were not solely sup­plied by Apple. Does that mean that you are for Apple allow­ing other com­pa­nies to cre­ate devel­op­ment tools for the iPhone and iPad and that moves by Apple to block such tools would not be accept­able? If so, our posi­tion are not dif­fer­ent. My con­cern is around Apple being the sole sup­plier and not allow­ing oth­ers to sup­ply. It’s a closed sys­tem and that’s what wor­ries me.

      On the cake anal­ogy, I would go one fur­ther and ask you if that’s OK. Let’s say that them com­pany were to say that you can only used the unbleached flour sold by that com­pany. Would it still be accept­able then? And let’s take it just one degree fur­ther, which is that the com­pany would then decide which devel­oper gets to the lim­ited sup­ply of unbleached flour? Would that be accept­able then?

      I agree the com­pany has no legal respon­si­bil­ity to explain itself. How­ever, when it comes to the moral part, I’m not so sure. When Microsoft took the same approach in the 1990s (cer­ti­fy­ing which devices could receive an inter­op­er­abil­ity label with Win­dows) its behav­ior was called monop­o­lis­tic and preda­tory. Now that Apple is doing, why is it OK?

      Regard­ing your reply to my sec­ond ques­tion, I think we’re in full agree­ment as to the devel­oper ques­tion and that’s where I’m draw­ing the China anal­ogy: IF you are for open sys­tems, do you develop for the Apple plat­form in spite of its posi­tion regard­ing that or do you look the other way and get access to the riches that are rep­re­sented by Apple con­sumers? In an ideal world, a devel­oper could develop for both plat­form and say “let the mar­ket decide” but, for most devel­op­ers, lim­ited resources must be pointed to one plat­form or another. I would also argue that the con­sumer and devel­oper mar­kets are two dif­fer­ent ones and the con­sumer mar­ket has always opted for more closed (ie. secure) sys­tems while the devel­oper mar­ket has tended to vote for more open ones. And that’s the fric­tion I’m try­ing to highlight.

      (I will state my pref­er­ence as being for more open­ness, although I see the value of cer­tain closed sys­tems at time. Unlike you, I pre­fer cities (ie. more like hous­ing com­mu­ni­ties) to sub­ur­ban gated com­mu­ni­ties. In my view, Apple chose wisely when it comes to con­sumers but I’m not so sure when it comes to developers.)

      Fully agree that there are big­ger things than Apple and that the com­pany does not vio­late human rights (and as far as moral­ity, I think it is a non-matter as busi­ness mod­els are not cre­ated to be moral or immoral). The ques­tion I keep return­ing to, how­ever, is when it comes to my own moral­ity as a devel­oper: by sup­port­ing a sys­tem that is increas­ingly closed (and could erase some of the progress being made by the Inter­net in terms of open­ness), would I, as a devel­oper sup­port a stance that could, in the long run, vio­late some human rights. It’s less about Apple than about the trend. If your moral com­pass is towards more closed being OK, then the next ques­tion becomes “is the reg­u­la­tion of a closed plat­form (let’s say through cen­sor­ship) OK?” My posi­tion is that the lat­ter is not and so the for­mer prob­a­bly isn’t either.

  • Don

    Tris­tan,

    You wrote: “My con­cern is around Apple being the sole sup­plier and not allow­ing oth­ers to sup­ply. It’s a closed sys­tem and that’s what wor­ries me.”

    Apple is not the sole sup­plier of the tools it requires for devel­op­ment. As far as I under­stand it, at least three C lan­guages are allowed (not just Objec­tive C) and Apple does not con­trol them although it has a clear pref­er­ence regard­ing Objec­tive C. Please cor­rect me if I’m wrong.

    You also wrote “Let’s say that the com­pany were to say that you can only used the unbleached flour sold by that com­pany. Would it still be accept­able then?”

    Think of the unbleached flour as one of the C lan­guages that Apple does NOT con­trol (at least two), and you have your answer. Per­fectly accept­able. Regard­ing access to the lim­ited sup­ply that you men­tion, there is actu­ally an unlim­ited sup­ply when it comes to the pro­gram­ming lan­guages that Apple has spec­i­fied. So devel­op­ers have choice, and it is not con­trolled by Apple.

    You also wrote: “I agree the com­pany has no legal respon­si­bil­ity to explain itself. How­ever, when it comes to the moral part, I’m not so sure. When Microsoft took the same approach in the 1990s (cer­ti­fy­ing which devices could receive an inter­op­er­abil­ity label with Win­dows) its behav­ior was called monop­o­lis­tic and predatory.”

    It has noth­ing to do with moral­ity. Microsoft was not charged or con­victed on the basis of moral­ity or lack of it. It was sim­ply a ques­tion of whether or not it was abus­ing its monop­oly posi­tion, regard­ing which there are clear business-related cri­te­ria. You can­not claim that Apple is doing the same thing unless you can demon­strate exactly how it is abus­ing its monop­oly posi­tion. Please explain.

    You also wrote: “Unlike you, I pre­fer cities (ie. more like hous­ing com­mu­ni­ties) to sub­ur­ban gated communities.”

    Some parts of cities are gated com­mu­ni­ties in effect. Bev­erly Hills, where I lived for sev­eral years, and which is in the heart of the city of Los Ange­les, had no lit­eral gates. Yet the ser­vices pro­vided for Bev­erly Hills made it a gated com­mu­nity in effect.

    You also wrote: “The ques­tion I keep return­ing to, how­ever, is when it comes to my own moral­ity as a devel­oper: by sup­port­ing a sys­tem that is increas­ingly closed (and could erase some of the progress being made by the Inter­net in terms of open­ness), would I, as a devel­oper sup­port a stance that could, in the long run, vio­late some human rights.”

    This sit­u­a­tion (vio­la­tion of human rights) does not exist, and if one looks at Apple’s record, there is absolutely no rea­son to believe that they would be inter­ested in vio­lat­ing human rights or reduc­ing the open­ness of the inter­net. They have clearly worked for open stan­dards on the inter­net. Web-based apps were the first apps pro­moted by Apple for “i” devices. They have also clearly said that they are not in favor of any closed, pro­pri­etary tech­nol­ogy being used as a build­ing block on the web. So, in fact, they are not fos­ter­ing any trend that would favor clos­ing the inter­net or clos­ing any open options that you have as a con­sumer. They’ve sim­ply decided that THEIR cake is going to be made accord­ing to their guide­lines until con­sumers vote with their pock­et­books and say that they pre­fer some­thing else. In my opin­ion, inter­pret­ing Apple’s behav­ior as some march towards vio­la­tion of human rights is clearly an attempt to spread fear, uncer­tainty, and doubt (FUD) since that inter­pre­ta­tion is not based on evidence.

    It seems to me that, apart from the Mac, Apple is mak­ing appli­ances. Think of it as a wash­ing machine of a par­tic­u­lar brand. It’s not so dif­fi­cult to under­stand when you think of it in those terms. The man­u­fac­turer is guar­an­tee­ing a cer­tain level of qual­ity and per­for­mance for the whole prod­uct by con­trol­ling the components.

    • http://www.tnl.net/blog/ Tris­tan Louis

      As far as I under­stand it, at least three C lan­guages are allowed (not just Objec­tive C) and Apple does not con­trol them although it has a clear pref­er­ence regard­ing Objec­tive C. Please cor­rect me if I’m wrong.

      My under­stand­ing was that Objec­tive C was the only fla­vor allowed. I didn’t real­ize that oth­ers were. If that’s the case, my wor­ries are less­ened, to some extent. How­ever, doesn’t every­thing need to run through Xcode even­tu­ally so it com­piles to the iPhone OS? or are there other com­pil­ers out there that are allowed to com­pile iPhone code?

      You can­not claim that Apple is doing the same thing unless you can demon­strate exactly how it is abus­ing its monop­oly posi­tion. Please explain.

      Here, I would argue that the many inci­dents sur­round­ing the App Store and its approval process when it comes to appli­ca­tion using undoc­u­mented iPhone APIs do rep­re­sent some level of abuse its terms of its monop­oly posi­tion. But hav­ing thought fur­ther about it, I can no longer argue that posi­tion since it is based on the assump­tion that Apple is the dom­i­nant player in the mobile space, some­thing that isn’t true yet. So you do have a point that there is cur­rently no monop­o­lis­tic behav­ior from Apple at this time.

      They have clearly worked for open stan­dards on the inter­net. Web-based apps were the first apps pro­moted by Apple for “i” devices. They have also clearly said that they are not in favor of any closed, pro­pri­etary tech­nol­ogy being used as a build­ing block on the web. So, in fact, they are not fos­ter­ing any trend that would favor clos­ing the inter­net or clos­ing any open options that you have as a consumer.

      A purist could argue that their sup­port for H.264 over Ogg The­ora or VP8 means that Apple is not really for open stan­dards on the net (or only par­tially so). But since Microsoft is tak­ing the same stance, one can assume that such open­ness is only the domain of purist. I do think, how­ever, as oth­ers do, that the lever of con­trol Apple is exert­ing on its own plat­forms rep­re­sents a slip­pery slope towards a more closed Inter­net. Not today, and not in the next cou­ple of years, but on a longer time horizon.

      It seems to me that, apart from the Mac, Apple is mak­ing appli­ances. Think of it as a wash­ing machine of a par­tic­u­lar brand. It’s not so dif­fi­cult to under­stand when you think of it in those terms. The man­u­fac­turer is guar­an­tee­ing a cer­tain level of qual­ity and per­for­mance for the whole prod­uct by con­trol­ling the components.

      I think this is where I have the most dif­fi­cul­ties. This is a man­i­fes­ta­tion of Apple as a con­sumer elec­tron­ics com­pany and I’m still look­ing at it as Apple, the com­puter soft­ware and hard­ware com­pany. It’s true that seen through this lens, Apple’s behav­ior is correct.

  • Don

    Tris­tan,

    Just a quick correction:

    I wrote: “Think of the unbleached flour as one of the C lan­guages that Apple does NOT con­trol (at least two), and you have your answer. Per­fectly acceptable.”

    What I meant to say was that it would be per­fectly accept­able for Apple to require use of those lan­guages since it is not the source of those lan­guages and nei­ther does it con­trol them.

  • Don

    Tris­tan,

    Thank you for the thought­ful response.

    I am not a devel­oper, so it is quite help­ful for me to hear things from that dif­fer­ent point of view. On the other hand, I have been watch­ing Apple as a con­sumer since 1984 when I pur­chased my first Mac and, soon after, came to the real­iza­tion that if I had just started col­lege a few years later than in 1974, I would prob­a­bly have cho­sen a com­puter technology-related career. Oh, well.

    My point is that I have a fairly good sense from watch­ing things over the years that, with Steve Jobs at the helm, you can be sure that Apple will always have as one of its main objec­tives the goal of mak­ing excel­lent prod­ucts that are excit­ing, enjoy­able, and inspir­ing for the end user. I am not naïve enough to think that there aren’t a host of other con­sid­er­a­tions at play, not the least of which is the poten­tial for profit. Apple thrives on com­pe­ti­tion, but they also want points of dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion. They will charge a pre­mium for that dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion. This means that what they pro­duce will never be the least expen­sive; it will always tend to the oppo­site extreme. And so they really can’t expect to keep a huge mar­ket share for any extended period of time. At the same time, how­ever, they will need to keep the respect and loy­alty of their con­sumer base. I can­not imag­ine them think­ing that they can afford to risk los­ing that con­sumer loy­alty and respect by being a force for mak­ing the inter­net less open and more restric­tive. Call him what you like (mega­lo­ma­niac, what­ever), you can be absolutely sure that Steve Jobs does not want to be remem­bered as the one who shut­tered the internet!

    As Apple shifts more and more into its new con­sumer elec­tron­ics mode, I am hop­ing to see some real com­pe­ti­tion. Hope­fully there will be sys­tems of vary­ing degrees of open­ness com­pet­ing against one another. Then the like­li­hood that a sin­gle company’s model will dic­tate the future will be less­ened, and devel­op­ers will be able to feel more comfortable.

    (By the way, I still have my 1984 Mac, and it still works.)

    • http://www.tnl.net/blog/ Tris­tan Louis

      Don,

      While I fully agree with you about Apple work­ing on devel­op­ing prod­ucts that are best of breed for con­sumers, the com­pany also has a long his­tory of abus­ing devel­op­ers and/or third party part­ners. Since you go way back in terms of Apple usage (and, yes, I am jeal­ous of your still work­ing 1984 mac as my mac SE finally died last year :) ), you will remem­ber how, when Steve Jobs returned, Apple moved from allow­ing third party hard­ware mak­ers to use its OS to being the sole provider of both soft­ware and hard­ware its OS ran on. You will also remem­ber how the move to OSX sur­prised many and how the sud­den drop of the OS 9 inter­preter in OSX 10.4 also came as a sur­prise to many. By com­par­i­son, I recently found a piece of Win­dows 3.1 soft­ware on a diskette and, for kicks, decided to try it out on Win­dows Vista and it still ran.

      Apple’s view is that in order to move for­ward, it needs to break with the past and, as a result, it gen­er­ally does so by impos­ing its own rules on its devel­op­ment com­mu­nity. But, since the intro­duc­tion of the iPhone, they’ve actu­ally got­ten rougher and rougher with their devel­op­ers. Sadly, Apple is now see­ing itself as a con­sumer elec­tron­ics com­pany instead of a com­puter one (for the most recent man­i­fes­ta­tion of such belief, it appears the next Apple Devel­oper Con­fer­ence has lit­tle on its slate for OSX devel­op­ers and is mostly focused on being and iPhone and iPad devel­op­ment conference).

      As Apple shifts more to the con­sumer elec­tron­ics space, it may also sig­nal to the rest of the PC indus­try that it needs to move in that direc­tion and the end result of this could be that com­put­ers, which have to date been a great democ­ra­tiz­ing force in terms of pro­vid­ing both cre­ation and con­sump­tion tools for the same price, could become a small, more rar­efied domain, lead­ing future gen­er­a­tions to think­ing that only gov­ern­ments and cor­po­ra­tions can cre­ate. And that, to me, would be a very sad thing.

  • AdamC

    Every­thing should be open and free and so should the CS5 suite be, won­der why is Adobe sell­ing it for top dollars.

    • http://www.tnl.net/blog/ Tris­tan Louis

      AdamC,

      I dis­agree with you about every­thing need­ing to be free. Value is cre­ated by any prod­uct and thus value should be assigned to them. That works for any com­pany (Apple and Adobe included in those cases)…

  • Don

    Tris­tan,

    I do under­stand your con­cerns. Things have def­i­nitely been rough for devel­op­ers, but I think there is more rea­son for hope than for fear.

    While it is in Apple’s DNA to be inno­v­a­tive and dis­rup­tive, enabling prod­ucts with enough dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion to sup­port charg­ing a pre­mium, Apple is first and fore­most a busi­ness. If I remem­ber cor­rectly, Apple was in dire straits—perhaps even at death’s door—when the deci­sions that led to the OS licens­ing débâ­cle were made (both at the front end and at the back end of the “exper­i­ment”). From their point of view at least, ensur­ing sur­vival of the com­pany trumped every­thing else. The com­mer­cial envi­ron­ment for Apple is very dif­fer­ent now, and it is very unlikely that we will see such des­per­ate moves and their con­se­quences being repeated.

    How­ever, the fact that Apple is a busi­ness first and an inno­va­tor sec­ond means that there is lit­tle or no chance that they will aban­don the cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als who rely on com­put­ers. It makes absolutely no sense for them to aban­don Mac OS X on desk­top com­put­ers because that is still a large pro­por­tion of their busi­ness. I think that they will be forced to con­tinue inno­vat­ing in that space, per­haps incor­po­rat­ing some of the advance­ments that we are see­ing in the iPad. But since it is their pref­er­ence not to be a commodity-level player, that space will con­tinue to be dom­i­nated by com­puter man­u­fac­tur­ers who pro­duce less expen­sive prod­ucts. (Although higher, Apple’s prices will have to be some­what com­pet­i­tive, help­ing to keep their equip­ment acces­si­ble to pro­fes­sional and more casual con­sumers alike.)

    In my opin­ion, what we’re see­ing as an appar­ent de-emphasis of OS X on Macs is Apple endur­ing sig­nif­i­cant labor pains in its birthing process of iPad-related changes that will affect its desk­top com­put­ers. When some­thing new is being cre­ated, there is always dis­rup­tion, and the more com­plete the cre­ation, the more dis­rup­tion there is. The ten­nis player who changes his/her long-used serv­ing tech­nique by mod­i­fy­ing his/her grip has to endure ini­tial regres­sive changes that dis­rupt his/her game and also adversely affect all the peo­ple asso­ci­ated, be it coaches, prac­tice part­ners, or fans. Apple endured severe labor pains in going from OS 9 to OS X, and its partners/developers suf­fered along with it (per­haps some­what more than a spouse stand­ing by through a deliv­ery), but that was the price of a bet­ter future for the entire family.

    I think that Apple will sup­ply both appli­ances and the reg­u­lar desktop-type com­put­ers that are used mainly for pro­duc­tiv­ity. Even if other man­u­fac­tur­ers in the PC indus­try fol­low Apple into the con­sumer elec­tron­ics space, they would be fool­ish to put aside their com­mer­cial inter­ests in the computer-for-productivity space. On the other hand, if Apple suc­ceeds in merg­ing con­sump­tion and pro­duc­tiv­ity on iPad-like devices and some of those devices serve to replace machines in that lat­ter space, it would not nec­es­sar­ily be a bad thing. Here again, because of its ten­dency to favor dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing inno­va­tions in sup­port of higher prices, Apple is not likely be a commodity-level player, instead leav­ing the lower end (and larger mar­ket share) for those who make less expen­sive devices. This should be good for both devel­op­ers and consumers.

    In any case, it’s prob­a­bly much bet­ter for the PC indus­try to strug­gle with the pres­ence of an inno­v­a­tive, dis­rup­tive force such as Apple than to wal­low in the status-quo that would exist otherwise.

    (Too bad about your Mac SE.… I booted up my 1984 Mac a few weeks ago for a curi­ous cable-installation tech­ni­cian and had a painful reminder of what it was like to be con­stantly switch­ing floppy discs!)

    • http://www.tnl.net/blog/ Tris­tan Louis

      Don,

      Where you and I dif­fer is on the long term prospects. You say:

      How­ever, the fact that Apple is a busi­ness first and an inno­va­tor sec­ond means that there is lit­tle or no chance that they will aban­don the cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als who rely on com­put­ers. It makes absolutely no sense for them to aban­don Mac OS X on desk­top com­put­ers because that is still a large pro­por­tion of their business.

      Where I dif­fer is that, over the short run, it’s run that it would make lit­tle sense but over a longer time hori­zon, one has to con­sider that OSX and the com­puter line are rep­re­sent­ing a lower and lower por­tion of over­all rev­enue. So one could assume that there is a num­ber (prob­a­bly under 5%) where it falls off. De-investment in the OSX plat­form already seems to have started (once again, I’ll point the the Apple devel­oper conference’s focus on iPad and iPhone instead of OSX as an exam­ple of that de-emphasis).

      The impact of Apple as a dis­rup­tor is another impor­tant fac­tor here. At the end of the day, I don’t care if it’s Apple or some­one else doing the dis­rup­tion but what I care about is the nature of the dis­rup­tion: in this case, it’s a dis­rup­tion that tries to dis­place the per­sonal com­puter, which allows its users to cre­ate as well as con­sume, with a device that is pri­mar­ily focused on con­sump­tion. THIS is the dis­rup­tion that I don’t like. As a cul­ture and as a soci­ety, such a dis­rup­tion is a return to older mod­els of cre­ation and con­sump­tion and I’m not con­vinced they were bet­ter models.

      If played out to a longer vision, one could see the com­put­ers stay­ing into the office but dis­ap­pear­ing from homes, replaced by consumption-mainly types of devices like the iPad. So teenagers who may be the next soft­ware pro­gram­mers, pho­tog­ra­phers, musi­cians, movie-makers, or writ­ers may no longer have access to the tools of cre­ation for such crafts as the Apple view appears to be that such crafts ought to stay in the hands of professionals.

  • Carsten

    Wait so first apple is china, then they lie… And next they rape lit­tle kids. Like adobe apple makes busi­ness deci­sions that are in their and their users’ best inter­est. So far apple has been doing quite well on this apple is happy, users are happy (just look at sales num­bers), and devel­op­ers are happy too (with excep­tion of tiny per­cent­age that has prob­lems). They are not in the busi­ness of mak­ing you happy they have larger audi­ence they care about. Same goes for adobe. Have they much cared about flash and flash mobile much over the last years? No. Just with iPhone have they woken up and now sud­denly demand road toll for a road they didn’t build. So if adobe would have a good prod­uct end users would care and so would apple but flash is just not that good or impor­tant. And so apple has every right not to care.

    • http://www.tnl.net/blog/ Tris­tan Louis

      Carsten,

      The main part of your argu­ment I dis­agree with is the following:

      Like adobe apple makes busi­ness deci­sions that are in their and their users’ best interest.

      My view is that “Like adobe apple makes busi­ness deci­sions that are in their and their company’s best inter­est.” Users really don’t fac­tor in either for Apple or Adobe in this fight.

      Let’s be clear, I never said that Adobe was a nice and clean com­pany in this fight: all I said was that Apple left devel­op­ers with a tough chal­lenge: “do I sup­port Apple’s phi­los­o­phy that closed sys­tems are bet­ter for all in the long run or do I loose out on some finan­cial oppor­tu­nity by tak­ing a moral stance?”

      The next issue is the one regard­ing claims of open­ness. I don’t think either com­pany has a right to claim open­ness here.

      So whether you sup­port Adobe or Apple on their respec­tive posi­tions on Flash mat­ters lit­tle to this decision.

  • Jim H

    If I wanted to go to a stu­pid, over­wrought metaphor store, I know where I’d buy my stock. Apple is not “closed” in any mean­ing­ful way. It it fully coöper­a­tive, it pub­lishes their APIs. The parts that con­nect with other sys­tems are com­pat­i­ble and/or open. Now, the new plat­forms have more lim­ited options. So what? Because Android is open source, what does that mean? Google spent mil­lions on that. Does that make them “open”? Just try and get the source code for any of their bread and but­ter. You have to be the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment to look inside there.

    If you’re say­ing Apple is not Linux, that’s true. Nei­ther is any other OS that makes money. Linux may take over the field if desk­tops and lap­tops ever become com­pletely out­moded. Not before then. Android is open because it’s part of a busi­ness strat­egy by a rapa­cious com­pany that makes its money on the back end, through adver­tis­ing. No other reason.

    OS X is open to almost all the pro­gram­ming lan­guages out there, and Flash too. But that’s a desk­top. The mobile hand­helds work best with Objec­tive C, says Jobs. Don’t think so? We’ll see.

    Jobs might be wrong. There might be a flight away from the con­trolled envi­ron­ment of the iPhone and the cen­tral­ized mar­ket­place and Apple’s $99 devel­oper fee. I don’t frankly think he is, but he’s placed his bets. I was just in an Apple store this after­noon, and peo­ple were three deep try­ing to use the iPads. Speed and an instinc­tive inter­face were the key. I didn’t hear any­body say­ing, “But it’s not open!”

    • http://www.tnl.net/blog/ Tris­tan Louis

      Jim,

      You claim that Apple pub­lishes their APIs. So when devel­op­ers are denied approval for inclu­sion in the App store because they used undoc­u­mented APIs, is the issue that the devel­oper used an API that was pub­lished and doc­u­mented by Apple and there­fore should be approved for inclu­sion in the store or is the issue that Apple has some undoc­u­mented APIs they don’t pub­lish and the developer’s app should be denied inclu­sion in the store? You can’t have it both ways.

      Sec­ondly, I’m not look­ing for Apple to be Linux (on the other hand, it seems your con­tention that OS not mak­ing money doesn’t seem to work when it comes to Red­Hat), what I’m look­ing for is for it not to claim to be be open when the real­ity is that it isn’t.

  • Dave

    The trend I am see­ing in com­ments on Apple vs Adobe arti­cles is that a large per­cent­age of the apple apol­o­gists have only a sur­face level non-technical under­stand­ing of the issue (see com­ment #26, Carsten for an exam­ple). Their motto is “In Steve we Trust” and they don’t really under­stand the impli­ca­tions of allow­ing 1 com­pany such con­trol over the direc­tion of the web. If you try to explain it to them in a clear and sim­ple way as this arti­cle does, they blindly defend.

    • http://www.tnl.net/blog/ Tris­tan Louis

      Dave,

      It seems the trend is the same for most Apple-related arti­cle ;)

  • http://www.wemakedotcoms.com/landings/2010/02/index.html Jerome

    Allow­ing Flash on the iPx plat­form would be com­mer­cial sui­cide for Apple’s App­Store. Same goes for allow­ing other browser plu­g­ins like Java, Sil­ve­light and Unity3D. So beyond video, it’s moslty a pro­tec­tion­ist busi­ness deci­sion. I am fine with that, just admit it and move on. You don’t need to bash Flash.

    Flash is a great plat­form to develop for. It deliv­ers con­tent to hun­dreds of mil­lion of inter­net users every­day. Some­thin Apple can’t even dream of. For years Flash Lite has been on mobile phones. Flash 10.1 and AIR 2.0 are Adobe’s offer­ing for the new mobile and desk­top mar­kets, a uni­fied player.

    “Flash is not that good” based on what? Flash has enabled inno­va­tion, cre­ativ­ity and amaz­ing inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ences online for 10 years now.

    • http://www.tnl.net/blog/ Tris­tan Louis

      Jerome,

      I agree with you that it would prob­a­bly hurt Apple’s level of con­trol to allow Flash (or Sil­verlight or Java) on their devices. And I fully agree with you that they should just admit the com­mer­cial impact instead of try­ing to wrap it into some FUD.

      To be hon­est, though, I’m not con­vinced that Flash has a lot of a future. I believe it was an impor­tant tran­si­tional tech­nol­ogy (and will con­tinue to be so for the next few years) but, in the long run, I sus­pect that HTML5 will super­sede Flash as the approach to code for inter­ac­tiv­ity and I sus­pect that H.264 will prob­a­bly become the de-facto stan­dard for video on the net (due to its sup­port from Apple and Microsoft).

      A quick ques­tion: On what phones are Flash 10.1 and AIR 2.0 available?

  • BigRed

    Tris­tan,

    While i don’t approve of out­right lying, that does seem to be where the media, mar­ket­ing, and press announce­ments have devolved. Apple has every right to place restric­tions on solu­tions devel­oped for its plat­forms. Real­is­ti­cally, devel­op­ers need to quit cry­ing like babies and decide whether or not they want to sup­port OS X devices. Just like they have to decide whether or not to sup­port Win­dows, Linux, etc. It’s a busi­ness call, not a tech­nol­ogy call. There are code gen­er­a­tion tech­nolo­gies that can cre­ate appli­ca­tions that can work on most plat­forms. To com­ply with Apple’s TOS, one must sim­ply select a tool that gen­er­ates C/C++/Objective-C or Javascript and that uses pub­lic APIs. Done.

    The prob­lem is that the indus­try has dumbed down devel­op­ers into being unwill­ing (or worse, unable) to learn a lan­guage and a library set. Some of this can be attrib­uted to the fal­lacy of every­thing being HTML/CSS/Javascript (web tech) or only need­ing to be writ­ten in a sin­gle lan­guage (Java/C#). As a long time pro­fes­sional who has had to deal with cross plat­form issues, my take on the whole Adobe / Apple squab­ble is that Adobe was unable to make its vision of the “Flash Web” a real­ity and is will­ing to resort to any tac­tic to pre­vent Flash from fad­ing into obscurity.

    Apple’s per­spec­tive is quite clear. “We don’t care about other plat­forms other than our own.” With that in mind, cross-platform com­pi­la­tion that pro­vides a low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor approach will always be unsat­is­fac­tory. As Jobs notes, intro­duc­ing a mid­dle layer rel­e­gates devel­op­ers to being sub­servient to the mid­dle tier provider, although I will note that it is their own lazi­ness that puts them in that posi­tion. And hon­estly, Apple shouldn’t care about other plat­forms. That’s a busi­ness call.

    Repeat­ing the mantra about how unfair it is to devel­op­ers merely demon­strates that those devel­op­ers are lit­tle more than tool users. Devel­op­ers gen­er­ally don’t make busi­ness deci­sions. If a busi­ness decides that it needs to be on the iPhone OS plat­form, it will do what is nec­es­sary to get there, i.e., hire new devel­op­ers if needed. Putting the mat­ter up for debate in the tech­ni­cal com­mu­nity is really a waste of time. If those devel­op­ers are so unhappy with Apple’s deci­sion they can develop for Android, Sym­bian, WinMo, etc. What I sus­pect is really hap­pen­ing is that peo­ple are being forced out of their com­fort zone and they don’t like that because it means that they have to learn some­thing new.

    But your mileage may vary…

    • http://www.tnl.net/blog/ Tris­tan Louis

      BigRed,

      I fully agree with your first para­graph here (hence the China com­par­i­son: “do what’s right or do what’s finan­cially reward­ing?” is the ques­tion now to be con­tem­plated by devel­op­ers). But I dis­agree with your last one, which seems to con­tra­dict how you opened. Devel­op­ers will develop appli­ca­tions based on a num­ber of fac­tors but mar­ket con­di­tions and mar­ket size is the kind of fac­tor they have to con­sider. Under that model, not devel­op­ing for Apple is a ridicu­lous con­cept since it has such a large share of the smart­phone market.

      I agree with you that devel­op­ers at large orga­ni­za­tions do not make busi­ness deci­sions but I believe that inde­pen­dent devel­op­ers and devel­op­ers work­ing for start-ups have some level of influ­ence on busi­ness deci­sions. And those devel­op­ers have an under­stand­ing of mar­ket forces, leav­ing them to won­der which is the best approach: is Apple’s iDe­vices mar­ket too big to ignore or should one con­sider Apple’s phi­los­o­phy and its impact on soci­ety and culture?

  • http://www.trustytimeshop.com rolex day­tona

    If you’re say­ing Apple is not Linux, that’s true. Nei­ther is any other OS that makes money. Linux may take over the field if desk­tops and lap­tops ever become com­pletely out­moded. Not before then. Android is open because it’s part of a busi­ness strat­egy by a rapa­cious com­pany that makes its money on the back end, through adver­tis­ing. No other reason.